I use Dorico and I’m interested in NPPE (Noteperformer Playback Engine) for BBCSO.
My goal is to find an alternative to creating mock-ups in a DAW, because it bothers me that I spend most of my time programming MIDI CC, articulations, note lengths and delays, instead of actually composing. NPPE seems to reduce this effort considerably.
My question to users of NPPE would therefore be whether, in your experience, this is actually the case and you are able to create a mock-up that at least comes close to a mockup in a DAW. Do you think the realism and quality of the playback is enough for a finished piece ready for distribution (after some mixing of the stems)?
I’m a bit unsure about all of this, because the official demos on YouTube aren’t that great or better said, I think the native NP sounds better in almost all cases.
It depends on what you want to do. If you just need a credible prototype of a piece to be then performed by real players, it is more than good.
If you want a realistic rendition of an orchestra, it will still play as an intelligent machine trying to simulate a human player, but still recognized as a machine.
In any case, I no longer use a DAW for making orchestral simulation, and work entirely in Dorico. It makes it much easier, with musical symbols interpreted as such, and no need of computeresque codes and control data.
There are two factors in any mock-up: the quality of the library; and the skill of the DAW operator.
NPPE provides you instantly with a decent level of ‘DAW skill’ with no effort.
That having been said, in my use, with the BBCSO engine, I’ve often preferred the NP ‘original’ rendition as being more balanced and ‘real’ – even if the sounds themselves are less so. If that makes sense.
The trouble with reality, of course, is that it is deeply flawed!
Meaning it sounds good enough to be used in media or streaming.
Creating a mockup with hours investing in editing MIDI CC data and so on is usually a “good enough” result for my use-cases. This is really time consuming, because I basically have to check each note.
My intend is to safe all (or most) of this time programming a good sounding mock-up in a DAW, because NPPE should take care of the dynamics, balancing, articulaton switching and so on.
I’m not looking for something that is equal to a real orchestra, but equal to a well made DAW mock-up. Or pretty close at least.
By “audience” I mean: who, specifically, do you imagine would be listening and for what purpose(s)? I find NP’s native output to be perfectly fine for my “classical” (and even — with extra effort — jazz) works if the intended listener is (1) a potential performer or conductor asking for a mock-up to “get a sense of the piece” more quickly than score study would allow; or (2) colleague/friend/etc. who’s curious about my works for which no other recording exists.
I would never think to use my audio exports for “media” in the sense of a commercial release of any kind. (Not sure how you mean that term.) That’s largely a philosophical stance for me, but even if I was okay with the idea computer-generated performances over human, I think I would need to do a lot more to produce something I would deem worthy. Like you, though, I don’t want to work that hard on computer-generated sound, so at that point I’d probably “pony up” and hire out to someplace like Ravel Virtual Studios.
Thank you. I should have probably clarified that I’m just a hobbyist, so it’s not like I’m getting paid to write something for TV. Therefore my standard isn’t so high, because it’s just for a handful of casual listeners on Spotify and for some videos I’m (or friends) planning to produce. So, hiring a real orchestra is out of my scope. So what comes out of Dorico or my DAW is what people will be listening to. It’s not going to be a rendition for conducter or musicians.
I switched to Dorico, because I greatly prefer to write with notation, not piano roll - I know Dorico is manly for engraving and creating sheets for conducters and performers, but I use it as a composition tool.
I used expression maps to set everything up and generally, it works pretty good - but there is still a lot of clean-up required. My hope with NPPE was, all this balancing, creating MIDI CC curves and so on wouldn’t be required anymore.
I know this is all pretty abstract, because there is no definitive point when a mock-up is acceptable or deemed good. What might be “good enough” for me might sound horrible for others.
I guess I just wanted to hear from people using NPPE, if they still need to do mock-ups in a DAW (if the piece is not being performed and the rendering in the DAW is the final piece) or NPPE is so good in interpretating of those sample libraries (namely BBCSO) that people can usually skip this step with NPPE.
Sounds like NP (with or without NPPEs and external sample libraries) will serve you very well.
It’s also great that Dorico’s Play Mode includes the Key Editor and MIDI Controller plus the option for Played Durations adjustment. I find those together to give me all of the DAW-like control I need to get very listenable results.
I have NPPE with BBCSO Core, and I find myself going between BBCSO, regular NotePerformer, and NPPE + Iconica Sketch. Some things sound better on one than the other. If I had to make a snap decision, I’d say that slow string music (e.g. last movement of Mahler 9) sounds better with BBCSO, while more rhythmic music often sounds better with NP. But lately even for rhythmic stuff I’m leaning more towards BBCSO.
Just now I’ve been comparing Mahler 9 with all three, and it’s hard to choose. Iconica Sketch’s strings maybe have a little better connection between notes, but BBCSO’s strings have a fuller sound. NP by itself doesn’t have good enough strings, which I believe is one of the main reasons for NPPE’s existence.
Of course real musicians sound way better! But it’s great to have this level of realism when composing. Wow.
I think it’s absolutely insanely amazing how good playback is today. Is it perfect? No it’s not perfect but compared to not that long ago… wow. Personally I am quite fine with just plain ol’ NP.
yes – although my favourite NPPE so far is Cinematic Studio, I also use BBC Core and would certainly prefer it in most music to the mentioned alternatives. I agree entirely that native NP can work well with faster rhythmical stuff. We had a quite impressive demo of The Rite of Spring quite a while back. But anything with prominent strings, especially slower lyrical music simply shows up the poor string tone too much. So in general, it’s certainly best to use NPPE and the BBC SO implementation has been widely praised and it would take a lot of work to get anything better in a DAW. The BBCSO is best with warm, romantic music.
So in general, it’s certainly best to use NPPE and the BBC SO implementation has been widely praised and it would take a lot of work to get anything better in a DAW.
That’s an interesting assessment, because what I gathered from other discussion I found, it usually get’s the evalution of being “fine” and a DAW mock-up being on another level in terms of achievable realism.
As far as I can tell, with NPPE you basically also give up control, as in editing and changing MIDI CC yourself usually doesn’t work out in combination with NPPE. So getting to this level of realism achievable in a DAW is basically depended on further refinement by Noteperformer.
A recent project, I used NP, exported the stems (each instrument) as I felt the timps and a few other instruments were being lost or could be improved on. Imported all into a DAW to just tweak a few things (easier in that environment than playing around with f, ff etc. dynamic markings (which I preferred to stay as they were)), to render a better version of itself.
If it needed a solo violin in a specific area, I might have simply done that track in the DAW, with a little more realism (midi keyboard, mod, wheel with a nice sample suitable for its purpose for this track) and muted the Dorico NP one.
I do not want to spend too much time in Dorico and midi CC etc. when I can (for me) more easily get what I want in the DAW.
Anyway, as you know you can trial NP and its playback engine with your library and assess for yourself.
So, I tested NPPE now side by side with my own expression maps for a few hours. Here are my thoughts as to “complete” this thread.
Positive:
No more setup required in terms of percussion and expression maps
The Noteperfomer interface is really well made and intuitive
Performance is really good
Balancing out of the box e.g. for shorts and longs is a bit better then my own expression maps
Timings are great
Settings available is all I need (changing mixes and/or microphones, reverb, volume, pan)
Neutral:
Selections of libraries is a bit limited, but I’m sure they will add more in the future
Apart from minor better balancing between shorts and longs, I don’t hear any difference compared to my own expression maps
Negative:
No connection to mixer, so I can’t use my room correction VST. I couldn’t find a way to insert this into Noteperformer’s mixer
Overall, I don’t hear much of a difference between my own expression maps and using NPPE. I’d also limit myself to the libraries currently available, if I where to use NPPE exclusively.
It’s definitly a time-saver in terms of setup (don’t need to bother with expression maps and negative delays), but it’s not the step up I hoped for in comparison to my own Dorico setup (meaning using my own expression maps) just in terms of playback.
To put it in more abstract numbers, I feel like using expression maps or NPPE and not bothering with programming MIDI CC and so on at all, gets me about 85-90% (NPPE being closer to 90%) of the results I’m looking for, but for the last 10-15%, I’m still back to drawing MIDI CC curves and so on, but there is a huge time investment required. I’m not sure that’s worth it going forward, but that’s another question.
So in conclusion, it’s a really nice program, but not the fix to my current “problem” - just composing and not bothering with programming at all to get the best (in my case meaning most realistic) results. I’ll still try it out for the time being, but’s that my experience after a few hours of A/B testing.
very fair points! I do occasionally experience frustration that NP takes over control in certain areas where I’d like manual override – of course there is still the chance to do quite a lot in the key editor but things don’t always work quite as you might expect. Nevertheless, the BBC SO is not a particularly easy library to handle because of certain timing and transition issues and, although for ultimate control you might want a DAW, in practical terms, it is much the easiest to get nice results with this library under NPPE --I’ve tried both approaches and to me it’s no contest. That’s not necessarily the case with all libraries (with one or two I continue to use my own maps) but I do feel there’s a strong case here.
